Study plan

For instance, it has been widely reported how players form meaningful – even emotional – ties to other players (e.g. Koster, 1998). Equally well-studied are phenomena such as identity play (Turkle, 1997), personality types of players (Yee, 2001), discrepancies between apparent game goals and actual player behaviour (Jakobsson & Taylor, 2003), the formation and negotiation of norms, the politics of game design (Blomberg, Eneman, & Klang, 2003; Taylor, 2003) and the process and challenges of designing online games (Bartle, 2003; Eladhari & Lindley, 2003; Mulligan & Patrovsky, 2003). Recently, much attention has been devoted to the legal rights of avatars (Castronova, 2003b; Hunter & Lastowka, 2003; Lastowka & Hunter, Forthcoming), the dynamics of in-game economies (Castronova, 2001; Castronova, 2003a), and the extension of online worlds into real life brought about by systematic sales of game objects and characters for real world money.